Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology is generally used to detect voice and key inputs from a user. Various organizations such as banks, insurance companies, and other service providers use IVR technology to manage calls from their customers. Typically, IVR systems are mainly used by organizations that have high call volumes.
Generally, when the user calls a destination, such as a bank, an automated audio menu is played. The audio IVR menu may provide options to the user to connect to a particular department of the destination to receive services, such as account balance inquiry, therefrom. Typically, each destination may have different departments and various services corresponding to each department. The IVR menu may provide more than one options to the users to select a particular department to enquire about or gain various services corresponding thereto. For example, an IVR menu of a bank may include options related to services corresponding to account department, loan department, credit card department, customer care etc. for example, the user may choose an option corresponding to loan department of a bank.
Further, if a customer calls an organization for receiving information, the IVR system of the organization places the call of the customer (caller) on hold for some purpose. The hold duration of the call may vary from one minute to one hour or even more. Thus the customer is forced to wait for response from the IVR system till the call is on hold. This leads to unnecessary time consumption (on the customer's part) that usually annoys the customer and may also encourage the customer to disconnect the call. Sometimes, IVR systems play soothing music during the hold duration of the call to entertain the caller. However, not every caller enjoys the music. Therefore, even the music playing during the hold duration of a call may become annoying for few callers.
Further, some organizations provide advertisements to the caller during the hold duration of a call. Generally, the advertisements are audio advertisements that can be played for the caller by the IVR system. However, the audio advertisements can be more annoying for the callers as the advertisements selected by the IVR systems are general and not intended to be of interest to the caller. Therefore, the advertisements may become even more annoying for the caller.
Furthermore, the duration for which a caller holds a call to receive a response from the dialed destination is typically unknown to the caller. Therefore, the caller is uncertain of the duration for which he/she is required to hold the call. Generally, the callers wait for a certain number of minutes and then disconnect the call if they don't receive a response. Moreover, in some cases, the callers may be impatient and may prefer to work on other things during the hold time. However, in such cases, the callers need to pay some attention to the status of the call, which again might be annoying to the users. The aforementioned limitations of the IVR system may influence the users to minimize the use of IVR technology.
Therefore, there is a need for improvement in the IVR technology to make the hold duration in the IVR calls more interesting, more interactive and more informational to the caller. Further, there is a need of a system that can allow the caller to focus on other work while the IVR call is on-hold.